Artists generally collect kits of art supplies such as variously colored paints in bottles, tubes or watercolor pan paint pallets, as well as painting and drawing instruments and carrying containers. Children most often work with commercially available bottled paints and watercolor pan paint pallets. These supplies are provided in standard sizes by many manufacturers. Children especially make use of such paints in school and extracurricular art classes. While adults are generally able to cope with myriad supplies, children often find difficulty in organizing and using such supplies without spilling them. While carrying trays for such supplies have been devised, they often are difficult to use or have tops or handles which inhibit access to the paint containers. Typically, these trays are solely made for transporting the paints, which must then be removed from the trays for use by the artist.
Artists also often mix various colors of paints to obtain an exact hue or tint. Adults do such mixing on paint mixing boards. However, children, unaccustomed to such messy procedures, often mix colors directly on a desk top or on a piece of paper which bleeds through onto a desk top.
After completing a painting, an artist must clean and store a variety of art supplies. After only one or two uses, a conventional artist's pallet is defaced with blended paints and smears which cannot be cleaned. For children, the chore of cleaning up after painting is heightened when they have smeared paint on a school desk or kitchen table. A paint container tray for use by children should be easily cleanable by a child with a minimum of supervision.
Finally, artists are often at a loss as to where to place their paint brushes when they have finished painting for the day. Children especially are faced with a lack of convenient storage locations for their paint brushes, as their brushes often come in shrink-wrapped packages which cannot be reused once they are opened. For this reason, children often misplace their brushes or place brushes in their school desks where the brushes can be damaged by the constant movement of books into and out of the desk. Additionally, when a brush is cleaned immediately after use, the brush remains wet with either water or paint thinner for some time, and this wet brush cannot be placed in a desk or laid down on any good surface.